Chapter 1

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire,h was a man who,
for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage;h
there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a
distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and
respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents;w
there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs
changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over
the almost endless creationsh of the last century; and there,d
if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history
with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which
the favourite volume always opened:

"ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.

"Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth,
daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of
Gloucester, by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth,
born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son,
November 5, 1789; Mary, born November 20, 1791."

Precisely such had the paragraph originally stood from the printer's hands;
but Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of
himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary's
birth--"Married, December 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles
Musgrove, Esq. of Uppercross, in the county of Somerset,"
and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which
he had lost his wife.

Then followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family,
in the usual terms; how it had been first settled in Cheshire;
how mentioned in Dugdale,h serving the office of high sheriff,
representing a borough in three successive parliaments,
exertions of loyalty, and dignity of baronet, in the first year
of Charles II, with all the Marys and Elizabeths they had married;
forming altogether two handsome duodecimow pages, and concluding with
the arms and motto:--"Principal seat, Kellynch Hall, in the county
of Somerset," and Sir Walter's handwriting again in this finale:--

"Heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq., great grandson of
the second Sir Walter."

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character;
vanity of personh and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome
in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man.
Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did,
nor could the valet of any new made lordh be more delighted with
the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty
as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot,
who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect
and devotion.

His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment;
since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character
to any thing deserved by his own. Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman,
sensible and amiable; whose judgementd and conduct, if they might be
pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot,
had never required indulgence afterwards.--She had humoured,
or softened, or concealed his failings, and promoted his real
respectability for seventeen years; and though not the very happiest
being in the world herself, had found enough in her duties, her friends,
and her children, to attach her to life, and make it no matter of
indifference to her when she was called on to quit them.--Three
girls, the two eldest sixteen and fourteen, was an awful legacy
for a mother to bequeath, an awful charge rather, to confide to
the authority and guidance of a conceited, silly father.
She had, however, one very intimate friend, a sensible, deserving woman,
who had been brought, by strong attachment to herself, to settle
close by her, in the village of Kellynch; and on her kindness and advice,
Lady Elliot mainly relied for the best help and maintenance of
the good principles and instruction which she had been anxiously
giving her daughters.

This friend, and Sir Walter, did not marry, whatever might have been
anticipated on that head by their acquaintance. Thirteen years
had passed away since Lady Elliot's death, and they were still
near neighbours and intimate friends, and one remained a widower,
the other a widow.

For students, teachers, scholars, and the inquisitive general reader: To employ the full capacity of the annotations, please go to bookdoors.com and click on ReSearch Engine. You will discover a variety of informative ways to use the annotations to this and to any one of the other BookDoors In Context editions. You will also be able to search the text of all of the other works on the site. …

County in southwestern England, its northern shore bordering on the Bristol Channel and its closest point to London just over 100 miles. Bristol, an important port in the 18th and 19th centuries is on Somerset's northern border, and Bath is within the county.

Baronets and knights were outside and below the peerage (dukes, archbishops, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons who made up the aristocracy, sometimes known as "grandees") and were comparatively numerous, about 900. The peerage at the beginning of the 19…

A patent is a document originating with the king or queen and conferring in this case the title of baronet. Although Sir Walter's rank may not be very high, that in his mind is compensated for by the age of his family. He is savoring the limited remnant of genuinely old families who have survived to the present year, 1814, as opposed to the many parvenu nobility who were ennobled in the middle and later part of the 18th c.

The explosive creation of baronets and knights in the course of the 18th c. sprung from a variety of causes, among them an increase of wealth on the part of manufacturers and bankers, the bitterly fought political battles in which Tories or Whigs held out the prospect of a patent of nobility as a reward for loyalty and service, and artistic achievement during an age when writers, a…

Were the reader to read aloud this opening (a single long sentence), she or he would hear the rhythmic litany of "there," the four of them parallel, each intoned at the beginning of a main clause, each a reverential iteration of the thing it represents, the Baronetage, as if it were the King James Bible and Austen was reminding us of Numbers. …

Sir Walter's personal vanity should be understood in the context of the Regency, an era known for the ostentatious narcissism of the Regent himself, of his sometime friend Beau Brummel, and of a court that slavishly aped the Regent's dandyism. The men and women of the great Whig families competed with one another in displays of affluence and outrageous taste (nearly diaphanous gowns that bespoke an unprecedented sexuality in women's dress) in an effort to be recognized leaders of the beau monde.…

The social standing of servants corresponded to that of their employers. The valet of a lord would occupy a higher place than a baronet's valet (there's much about "precedence" in this novel). Behind Sir Walter's back, Austen draws the ignominious comparison not between him and a lord but between him and a valet (how outraged he'd be if he knew). Such a valet would tyrannize over his social inferiors while toadying before his superiors.